Servants, not volunteers

TIPP CITY, OHIO -- It is not that Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church sits in the middle of a Midwestern cornfield that makes it notable. Nor even that its pastor preaches in jeans and sandals to a working-class congregation sipping coffee in shorts and T-shirts.

More to the point: Of the hundreds of American churches, ministries and local faith-based organizations that for nearly three years have poured themselves out on behalf of wounded New

Orleans, few have matched the sustained commitment to Hurricane Katrina victims of this megachurch 15 miles north of economically depressed Dayton, Ohio.

Over two and a half years, Ginghamsburg has sent 41 teams of volunteers to help rebuild the New Orleans area.

They are still coming.

Five teams have come so far in 2008; six more are booked for later this year.

The end is not in sight.

"We'll keep coming until people tell us to stop," said Craig Maxwell, Ginghamsburg's director of global missions. "And we'll keep promoting it, to make sure people know the need is still there.

"It's still our most-attended trip."

The Ohio volunteers come out of a faith community so ferociously committed to aiding the poor, whether in Dayton or Darfur, that its pastor, the Rev. Mike Slaughter -- he of the jeans and sandals -- regularly admonishes his congregation: "You get no points for coming to church on Sunday."

Instead, the life of Ginghamsburg is mission work, sending church members as far away as Thailand and Ghana "to be the hands and feet of Jesus" -- one of a store of "Slaughterisms" his congregants quote during breaks from hanging drywall in Slidell, Lacombe or the Lower 9th Ward.

"That's our DNA," Slaughter, 56, said in an interview. "You love God by serving people. The poor have a special priority with God .¤.¤. If it's not good news for the poor, it's not the Gospel."

Maxwell adds: "If you don't want to serve, you won't fit in here. You'll eventually become uncomfortable."

Shortly after being seared by images from Katrina flowing out of New Orleans, Ginghamsburg raised $113,000 in a single storm-relief offering. But, seeking to add muscle, Maxwell in early 2006 contacted what was then the Northshore Disaster Recovery Center, a Methodist operation that directed rebuilding volunteers to work sites in Slidell and elsewhere on the north shore.

Since then, most of Ginghamsburg's work has concentrated there, with a few forays into New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward.

Working through that center, now called the Southeast Louisiana Disaster Recovery Center, Ginghamsburg workers were among those sent to the aid of 60-year-old Carol Avery in Lacombe.

In 2005, 5 feet of hurricane storm surge swept through the first floor of her two-story home three miles from Lake Pontchartrain. The Averys had no flood insurance.

Avery and her husband, Jerry, who lost his job shortly after the storm, gutted the first floor themselves. But two years later they were stalled. Avery said a contractor had ripped them off, the state's Road Home relief program proved impenetrable, they were broke and she was disappearing into a black depression.

"I'd stopped caring. I didn't get out of bed for a month," she said.

But three weeks ago, the house was nearly finished. Teams working out of the Methodist storm center, some of them from Ginghamsburg, had raised new walls and laid new floors, rewired the first floor, installed a donated air conditioning and heating system and rebuilt a bathroom. The place smelled of fresh paint.

"Before, it was like every door was shut," Avery said. "But when they showed up, it was like a door opened, and then another, and then -- I woke up. Like, I was alive again."

Upstairs one recent day, 47-year-old Rick Baker of Tipp City, a Motorola technical support worker on his fourth trip to the New Orleans area, installed new electrical boxes and worked on some wiring issues. His partner, 18-year-old Rob Pratt of nearby Huber Heights, had bailed on his high-school graduation to make his first trip.

"This gets me fired up," Baker said. "We've got to do this. This is our back yard, it's not across the world."

In every important way, contact between Ginghamsburg volunteers and storm victims mirrors the tens of thousands of connections made since Katrina between the armies of helpers and those helped.

Like other volunteers, Ginghamsburg workers often talk of being shaken by the scope of the disaster and the depth of need even now. They are exhilarated by the rush of instant gratitude from people they help.

"People at work think we're nuts," said Gale Pence, 57, who works for a building supplier in Dayton. "Let's see, you're taking a week's vacation, paying money to sleep on an air mattress and working for free?

"And we say, 'Yep.'"

At the same time, many say they feel deeply moved by the tenacity they see in New Orleans.

They marvel at the stories they hear; they say they're humbled by the enduring courage of the people they help.

"It inspires me to see how some of these people persevere," Baker said.

"We've kind of replaced our vacations with these mission trips," said Bruce Heft, 56, a school bus driver and instructor from rural Versailles. With his daughter, Elizabeth, 28, a middle-school math teacher, he will make three trips to New Orleans this year.

"When you get done with a two-week vacation, you need a week to rest up. After you go down and work a week in New Orleans, you come back and feel energized." 

Of the 4,400 who attend services at Ginghamsburg each week, the Hefts are among about 1,200 who are actually enrolled members, Maxwell said. That means they went through a three-month orientation on basic Methodist Christianity and promised to donate 10 percent of their income to the church.

But more, such is Ginghamsburg's intense culture that when new members are introduced, they are expected to announce their choice of mission work.

They are imbued with another Slaughterism: They are not "volunteers," but "servants."

The difference, explained Bruce Heft, is that "volunteers" serve at a time and place of their own choosing; "servants" obey the call of a master.

"We don't volunteer as a matter of convenience," Heft said. "We serve."
Ginghamsburg has so systematized its mission offerings that the church each year publishes a glossy catalogue of 11 distant mission opportunities: Chicago, New York City, New Orleans, Jamaica, Haiti and elsewhere. New Orleans trips outnumber all but the local mission efforts.

The logistics are already in place. Volunteers merely pick a trip and pay a fee ($275 for six days in New Orleans; $2,999 for 11 days in Thailand assisting locals trying to inhibit the sex-slave trade). They meet a trip leader like Baker, get oriented, and go.

For more expensive trips, such as the $2,000 English language camp in the Czech Republic the Hefts will also visit this year, Ginghamsburg shows them how to seek sponsors on the Internet -- in their case, posting their aspirations, earlier mission photos and journal entries on a Web site: www.elizabethandbruceonmission.com.

Slaughter himself has made at least two organizing trips to Darfur, although he hasn't visited New Orleans yet, his staff said.

Slaughter came to Ginghamsburg 29 years ago, inheriting a sleepy crossroads church dating to 1863. At 27, he had energy and ideas, first among them a passion for social justice that had already led him to major in social work at the University of Cincinnati before going on to seminary.

Slaughter jolted the tiny church. "He's not a nurturer; he's a gooser," said Dena Helsinger, a registered nurse on a recent New Orleans trip.

Slaughter jokes that he grew the church from 90 to 60 his first year. But his novel ideas caught on.

Today Ginghamsburg runs on a $6 million annual budget and employs about 120 full- and part-time staff. It holds five weekend services, supported by lavish multimedia technology and upbeat Christian music.

To increase its attractiveness, it shucks the traditional church trappings. The mood is joyful; dress is casual. Congregants arrive in shorts, grab a free pastry or cup of coffee in a sunny vestibule, chat with friends and wander into an hourlong service.

They sing, worship and listen to Slaughter's message in chairs that will be stowed away so the building can be put to another use later in the week.

At Ginghamsburg there is no traditional sanctuary; its architecture is not oriented to the sacred. No cross adorns the space, nor is there one above the angular, red-brick building. Instead, even worship space is a utilitarian commodity to be pushed and pulled into as many useful shapes as ministry and mission require.

"Minimize bricks" is another Slaughterism.

Not surprisingly, Ginghamsburg's culture reflects Slaughter's iconoclastic vision of a community of faith.

"I believe Jesus is absolute truth, but I don't believe Christianity is absolute truth," Slaughter said. "I believe Christianity as a religion has become something significantly different than what Jesus was about." Thus to be comfortable in mainstream Christianity, he said, is almost by definition to fall short of the radical message of the Gospel.

Although Ginghamsburg's culture is strongly evangelical, emphasizing Scripture and each believer's personal relationship with Jesus Christ, it is firmly embedded in the liberal evangelical tradition that dedicates itself to social justice rather than battling over cultural issues such as same-sex marriage and teaching evolution in the classroom.

Members say Ginghamsburg has never been a hotbed of conservative Republican politics. The church does not distribute voter guides. Public officials do not cultivate Slaughter's endorsement.

Yet Slaughter says it is pro-life in the broadest sense, throwing itself at the service of the poor and dispossessed.
In 2005, Ginghamsburg launched a continuing effort to aid victims of the genocide in Darfur. Working with the United Methodist Committee on Relief in the region, the Ohio church has raised more than $3 million for Darfur.

Four years ago, Slaughter admonished his congregation with typical bluntness that "Christmas is not your birthday. Stop acting like it."

Instead, he asked them to halve their holiday gift spending and give an equal amount to the poor in Darfur. It marked the beginning of the church's commitment to that cause.

The congregation gave $317,000 that year; it has responded with larger gifts each Christmas since then -- more than a $1 million last year, said Karen Smith, the church's communications director.

That illustrates another much-repeated Slaughterism:

"Live simply so that others may simply live."

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Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or (504)¤826-3344. 